Star rating: ****
New Territories ended with an act of closure: after 20 years of making performances - and of showing those pieces in Glasgow - the Chicago-based Goat Island is disbanding. The Lastmaker is the last we'll see of a collaborative incarnation which, under the inspirational direction of Lin Hixson, was always much more than the sum of its parts. For the record, those parts in 2008 were Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Mark Jeffrey, Bryan Saner and Lito Walkey.
On-stage, these five constructed a haunting meditation about change, finality, footprints and moving on. In some instances that was towards death - Lenny Bruce's last routine raspingly invoked by Christopher - or transformation. Jeffrey morphed into a chattily camp St Francis of Assisi, delivering his final precepts like a vaudeville turn, the up-front humour a well-judged foil for moments of touching solemnity elsewhere; moments such as the gentle exchange between Saner and Walkey - he the ageing poet, she the young amanuensis - on composing lines that say "goodbye", each with a profoundly different sense of what that word encompasses.
Goulish said significantly little, compared with previous productions, but busied himself building and clearing away the elements of set-dressing that included a detailed model of the Hagia Sophia, the church/mosque/ museum that proved a keystone in the Goats' creative process. Its shifts of use, its orientation, while staying in the same physical space, were echoed in the Goats' movement patterns where, by degrees, they altered alignment or took existing material in other directions.
Finally, they changed shoes. Hard soles replaced soft and, with footfalls ringing in our ears, they left the stage. The Lastmaker's images are still resonating.
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